When I was in very young we did not own a television set. I would spend hours in the evening drawing with my teenage brother. He would draw surf scenes and I would draw houses and people. My mother threw an art show for us one year, when I was probably at the end of first grade. She mounted our drawings on black construction paper and then mounted those to long rolls of blank newsprint to line the living room walls. She invited her artsy friends over for wine and cheese and to see our work. It was glorious. Well, all except for my mother’s one, full time, artist friend, who took the time to critically critique my work.
“Alice,” she said, leaning in to mentor me, “the eyes of your people paintings are at the very top of the head. If you look at a persons head, you will see that their eyes are actually in the middle of their head.”
I felt enormously embarrassed. I probably turned red. My mother must have noticed my discomfort, because she seemed to drift in from the periphery and suddenly appear at my side.
“Pat,” my mother said meaningfully, “if you will get down on the floor and crawl around and look up at adults, you will notice to a child’s perspective, eyes are actually at the very top of the head. Children are not eye to eye with an adults head. They cannot see the top of an adults head.”
The fact that I still remember this, is a testament to the artistic encouragement and understanding of our mother, a teacher, who so greatly valued the potential of children. She was able to articulate something which stuck with me forever, that our perspectives change, as we change. It was not my fault that I saw eyes at the top of adults heads. One day I might be tall enough to see the world differently.
I learned something else that day, that words have power to inspire confidence or to make us ashamed of our creations. All children begin with imagination and unabashed happiness at creating art, yet somewhere along the way most children lose the confidence to continue practicing and creating art. At some point most children become shy about showing their work, they hide it away, the vulnerability of sharing their creation too frightening to face. At some point, many children quit believing that their creations have any value at all.
I recently took an art history class which reminded me of how art can move our hearts. How beauty can inspire us to be better than we are. The class reminded me of how often beauty is systematically stripped from the lives of common people as unnecessary or frivolous. When a child lives in a chaotic home, travels to school through uninspired architecture and landscape, to a school with portable buildings, how can that child feel the value of their life in context? Society tells all people implicitly something about their worth as a human being, through the surroundings we build for them.
My brother has been on a planning commission and recently introduced me to the work of Christopher Alexander, who wrote, among others, the book, The Timeless Way of Building. In this book Alexander says, “The fact is, a person is so far formed by his surroundings that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.”
I think there is something to that. Our physical surroundings form who we become and what ideas we might have. Our surroundings contribute to whether we feel we have the right to the power to create beauty ourselves. Our physical surroundings contribute to our ability to be lifted up, or to be oppressed. Our surroundings contribute to our ability to have hope or a sense of hopelessness. When we surround our children with beauty, and encourage our children’s imagination in their creations, I believe that we teach them the audacity of possibility.
The Beatnik's Daughter 